FYI this usage of the term *universality* overloads a sorta-similar concept David Deutsch (DD) uses in *The Fabric of Reality* (1997) and in *The Beginning of Infinity* (2011). In BoI it’s the subject of Chapter 6 (titled “The Jump to Universality”) I don’t know what history the idea has prior to that. Some extracts are below to give you a bit of an idea of how DD uses the word ‘universality’.
Part of the reason I mention this is the reference to Popper; DD is one of the greatest living Popperians and has made significant contributions to critical rationalism. I’d consider it somewhat odd if the author(s) (Paul Christiano?) weren’t familiar with DD’s work given the overlap. DD devotes a fair proportion of BoI to discussing universality and AGI directly—both separately and together—and another fair proportion of the book to foundations for that discussion.
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General comment: Your/this use of ‘universality’ (particularly in AN #81) feels a lot like the idea of *totality* (as in a total function, etc). more like it’s omniscience rather than an important epistemic property.
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Some extracts from BoI on universality (with a particular but not exclusive focus on computation):
Here is an even more speculative possibility. The largest benefits of any universality, beyond whatever parochial problem it is intended to solve, come from its being useful for further innovation. And innovation is unpredictable. So, to appreciate universality at the time of its discovery, one must either value abstract knowledge for its own sake or expect it to yield unforeseeable benefits. In a society that rarely experienced change, both those attitudes would be quite unnatural. But that was reversed with the Enlightenment, whose quintessential idea is, as I have said, that progress is both desirable and attainable. And so, therefore, is universality.
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Babbage originally had no conception of computational universality. Nevertheless, the Difference Engine already comes remarkably close to it – not in its repertoire of computations, but in its physical constitution. To program it to print out a given table, one initializes certain cogs. Babbage eventually realized that this programming phase could itself be automated: the settings could be prepared on punched cards like Jacquard’s, and transferred mechanically into the cogs. This would not only remove the main remaining source of error, but also increase the machine’s repertoire. Babbage then realized that if the machine could also punch new cards for its own later use, and could control which punched card it would read next (say, by choosing from a stack of them, depending on the position of its cogs), then something qualitatively new would happen: the jump to universality. Babbage called this improved machine the Analytical Engine. He and his colleague the mathematician Ada, Countess of Lovelace, knew that it would be capable of computing anything that human ‘computers’ could, and that this included more than just arithmetic: it could do algebra, play chess, compose music, process images and so on. It would be what is today called a universal classical computer. (I shall explain the significance of the proviso ‘classical’ in Chapter 11, when I discuss quantum computers, which operate at a still higher level of universality.)
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The mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing later called this mistake ‘Lady Lovelace’s objection’. It was not computational universality that Lovelace failed to appreciate, but the universality of the laws of physics. Science at the time had almost no knowledge of the physics of the brain. Also, Darwin’s theory of evolution had not yet been published, and supernatural accounts of the nature of human beings were still prevalent. Today there is less mitigation for the minority of scientists and philosophers who still believe that AI is unattainable. For instance, the philosopher John Searle has placed the AI project in the following historical perspective: for centuries, some people have tried to explain the mind in mechanical terms, using similes and metaphors based on the most complex machines of the day. First the brain was supposed to be like an immensely complicated set of gears and levers. Then it was hydraulic pipes, then steam engines, then telephone exchanges – and, now that computers are our most impressive technology, brains are said to be computers. But this is still no more than a metaphor, says Searle, and there is no more reason to expect the brain to be a computer than a steam engine.
But there is. A steam engine is not a universal simulator. But a computer is, so expecting it to be able to do whatever neurons can is not a metaphor: it is a known and proven property of the laws of physics as best we know them. (And, as it happens, hydraulic pipes could also be made into a universal classical computer, and so could gears and levers, as Babbage showed.)
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Because of the necessity for error-correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems. It is why spoken languages build words out of a finite set of elementary sounds: speech would not be intelligible if it were analogue. It would not be possible to repeat, nor even to remember, what anyone had said. Nor, therefore, does it matter that universal writing systems cannot perfectly represent analogue information such as tones of voice. Nothing can represent those perfectly. For the same reason, the sounds themselves can represent only a finite number of possible meanings. For example, humans can distinguish between only about seven different sound volumes. This is roughly reflected in standard musical notation, which has approximately seven different symbols for loudness (such as p, mf, f, and so on). And, for the same reason, speakers can only intend a finite number of possible meanings with each utterance. Another striking connection between all those diverse jumps to universality is that they all happened on Earth. In fact all known jumps to universality happened under the auspices of human beings – except one, which I have not mentioned yet, and from which all the others, historically, emerged. It happened during the early evolution of life.
FYI this usage of the term *universality* overloads a sorta-similar concept David Deutsch (DD) uses in *The Fabric of Reality* (1997) and in *The Beginning of Infinity* (2011). In BoI it’s the subject of Chapter 6 (titled “The Jump to Universality”) I don’t know what history the idea has prior to that. Some extracts are below to give you a bit of an idea of how DD uses the word ‘universality’.
Part of the reason I mention this is the reference to Popper; DD is one of the greatest living Popperians and has made significant contributions to critical rationalism. I’d consider it somewhat odd if the author(s) (Paul Christiano?) weren’t familiar with DD’s work given the overlap. DD devotes a fair proportion of BoI to discussing universality and AGI directly—both separately and together—and another fair proportion of the book to foundations for that discussion.
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General comment: Your/this use of ‘universality’ (particularly in AN #81) feels a lot like the idea of *totality* (as in a total function, etc). more like it’s omniscience rather than an important epistemic property.
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Some extracts from BoI on universality (with a particular but not exclusive focus on computation):
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